Microsoft Word - freedom_v13.doc

by David E. Schultz

  pronounced with the accent on the second syllable), and “A Vintage from Atlan-

  tis.” These must be ranked among Smith’s finest efforts in prose. It is very difficult to classify these tales, as it is most of Smith’s fiction. In form they are poems in prose; but conceptually and symbolically they may be generally considered as fables, parables, allegories.

  An important point to remember is that, while only five of his tales concern

  Atlantis, or Poseidonis, precisely, Smith’s other lost worlds, especially his other continents of Earth—which he has used or created as a background for some of

  his other stories—are implicitly Atlantean in concept-principle: Hyperborea, the first inhabited continent of Earth, a sort of proto-Atlantis; and Zothique, the last continent of Earth, a sort of infinitely latter-day Atlantis arisen out of the sea, while all the other former continents have subsided beneath the globe-wide oceans.

  In one of the specifically Atlantean tales the poet vouchsafes us a full-scale vision of Plato’s ancient capital of Atlantis. This occurs in “A Vintage from Atlantis,” a tale that Smith created in November 1931. This vision is one of the great set-pieces of typically Smithian description, comparable to any of the same engi-neered by Edmund Spenser for his epic-romance-allegory The Faerie Queene.

  The air about me seemed to brighten, with a redness of ghostly blood that was

  everywhere; a light that came not from the fire nor from the nocturnal heavens. I beheld the faces and forms of the drinkers [the fellow crew-members of the narrator], standing without shadow, as if mantled with a rosy phosphorescence. And

  beyond them, where they stared in troubled and restless wonder, the darkness was illumed with a strange light.

  Mad and unholy was the vision that I saw: for the harbour waves no longer

  lapped on the sand, and the sea had wholly vanished. The Black Falcon was gone, and where the reefs had been, great marble walls ascended, flushed as if with the ruby of lost sunsets. Above them were haughty domes of heathen temples, and

  spires of pagan palaces; and beneath were mighty streets and causeys where people passed in a never-ending throng. I thought that I gazed upon some immemorial

  city, such as had flourished in Earth’s prime; and I saw the trees of its terraced gardens, fairer than the palms of Eden. Listening, I heard the sound of dulcimers that were sweet as the moaning of women; and the cry of horns that told forgot-

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  ten glorious things; and the wild sweet singing of people who passed to some hidden, sacred festival within the walls.

  I saw that the light poured upward from the city, and was born of its streets

  and buildings. It blinded the heavens above; and the horizon beyond was lost in a shining mist. One building there was, a high fane above the rest, from which the light streamed in a ruddier flood; and from its open portals music came, sorcerous and beguiling as the far voices of bygone years. And the revellers passed gayly into its portals, but none came forth. The weird music seemed to call me and entice

  me; and I longed to tread the streets of the alien city, and a deep desire was upon me to mingle with its people and pass into the glowing Lane.

  Verily I knew why the drinkers had stared at the darkness and had muttered

  among themselves in wonder. I knew that they also longed to descend into the

  city. And I saw that a great causey, built of marble and gleaming with the red luster, ran downward from their very feet over meadows of unknown blossoms to

  the foremost buildings.

  Then, as I watched and listened, the singing grew sweeter, the music stranger,

  and the rosy luster brightened. Then, with no backward glance, no word or gesture of injunction to his men, Captain Dwale went slowly forward, treading the marble causey like a dreamer who walks in his dream. And after him, one by one, Roger

  Aglone and the crew followed in the same manner, going toward the city.

  Haply I too should have followed, drawn by the witching music. For truly it

  seemed that I had trod the ways of that city in former time, and had known the

  things whereof the music told and the voices sang. Well did I remember why the

  people passed eternally into the Lane, and why they came not forth; and there, it seemed, I should meet familiar and beloved faces, and take part in mysteries recalled from the foundered years.

  All this, which the wine had remembered through its sleep in the ocean

  depths, was mine to behold and conceive for a moment. And well it was that I had drunk less of that evil and pagan vintage than the others, and was less besotted than they with its luring vision. For even as Captain Dwale and his crew went toward the city, it appeared to me that the rosy glow began to fade a little. The walls took on a wavering thinness, and the domes grew insubstantial. The rose departed, the light was pale as a phosphor of the tomb; and the people went to and fro like phantoms, with a thin crying of ghostly horns and a ghostly singing. Dimly above the sunken causey the harbor waves returned; and Red Barnaby and his men

  walked down beneath them. Slowly the waters darkened above the Lading spires

  and walls; and the midnight blackened upon the sea; and the city was lost like the vanished bubbles of wine. ( AY 52–54)

  It is of interest to note—among the abundance of many other details in this

  overall vision—that, toward the end of the second paragraph quoted, we have a repeat or echo of “the palms of Eden” from the original version of “Dissidence”—

  “and I saw the trees of its terraced gardens, fairer than the palms of Eden.”

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  After 1938 , Smith virtually gave up the writing of prose fiction, at least in any real amount, and had returned to his first love, the creation of poetry in verse. In some of this later lyric poetry we find some scattered Atlantean references, and even a few full-scale Atlantean poems. Smith’s new, rejuvenated poetic drive or impulsion would last almost up until the time of his death, fueled as it was by two remarkable and lasting love affairs.

  In 1951 , Arkham House, after bringing out three collections of Smith’s highly imaginative fiction (in 1942, 1944, and 1948), published its first collection of poetry by the same author, The Dark Chateau, three of whose pieces contain Atlantean references. In the sixth and seventh stanzas of “Dominium in Excelsis” we note “the fabled Atlantean doom,” but now coupled with a resurrection out of the condition of such a catastrophic death.

  Thou shalt respire the flame and fume

  Of Beltis’ altars drowned in gloom

  Under her sharded fanes; or share

  The fabled Atlantean doom,

  And rise unharmed to light and air

  Out of old death, once more to dare

  With antinomian deed and thought

  The planet of thy slain despair— ( DC 17–18)

  In the second and third stanzas of “Malediction” there occurs a reference to

  Atlantis but the Atlantis in question is imaged as being “accurst.” (We also quote the sixth stanza as well as the final single line that follows it for an easier syntactical comprehension by the reader.)

  While the worms, apart from light,

  Eat the page where magians pored;

  While the kraken, blind and white,

  Guards the greening books abhorred

  Where the evil oghams rust—

  In accurst Atlantis stored;

  […]

  Never shall the spell be done

  And the curse be lifted never

  That shall find and leave you one

  With forgotten things for ever. ( DC 26)

  And in the final lines (47–54) of “Revenant” we note an allusion to “atlantean fanes” but clearly intended by the poet in a generic rather than a specific usage, as

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  clearly demonstrated by his a
bandonment of the upper-case a at the start of the adjective “atlantean.”

  Mummied and ceremented,

  I sit in councils of the kingly dead,

  And oftentimes for vestiture I wear

  The granite of great idols looming darkly

  In atlantean fanes;

  Or closely now and starkly,

  I cling as clings the attenuating air

  Above the ruins bare. ( DC 54)

  In 1958, Arkham House published its second collection of poetry by Smith, Spells and Philtres, which has two Atlantean references. Our first example Atlantean is the entire poem of “Tolometh,” detailing as it does a major god of Poseidonis, the large island that Smith presents as the last major fragment of foundering Atlantis, evidently taking a clue from the Theosophist writings of Helena Blavatsky:

  In billow-lost Poseidonis

  I was the black god of the abyss;

  My three horns were of similor

  Above my double diadem;

  My one eye was a moon-bright gem

  Found in a monstrous meteor.

  Incredible far peoples came,

  Called by the thunders of my fame,

  And passed below my terraced throne

  Where titan pards and lions stood,

  As pours a never-lapsing flood

  Before the wind of winter blown.

  Below my glooming architraves

  One brown eternal file of slaves

  Came in from mines of chalcedon,

  And camels from the long plateaus

  Laid down their sard and peridoz,

  Their incense and their cinnamon.

  The star-born evil that I brought

  Through all that ancient land was wrought;

  All women took my yoke of shame;

  I reared, through sunless centuries,

  The thrones of hell-black wizardries,

  The hecatombs of blood and flame.

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  But now, within my sunken walls,

  The slow blind ocean-serpent crawls,

  And sea-worms are my ministers,

  And wandering fishes pass me now

  Or press before mine eyeless brow

  As once the thronging worshippers. . . .

  And yet, in ways outpassing thought,

  Men worship me that know me not.

  They work my will. I shall arise

  In that last dawn of atom-fire,

  To stand upon the planet’s pyre

  And cast my shadow on the skies. ( SP 274–75)

  Our second example Atlantean occurs in “The Prophet Speaks,” which de-

  votes its full second stanza to an Atlantean allusion but, as in the case of “Malediction” included in The Dark Chateau, the Atlantis in question the poet views through a glass darkly. (We quote the first full stanza as well on behalf of the reader’s easier comprehension.)

  City forbanned by seer and god and devil!

  In glory less than Tyre or fabled Ys,

  But more than they in mere, surpassing evil!

  Yea, black Atlantis, fallen beneath dim seas

  For sinful lore and rites to demons done,

  Bore not the weight of such iniquities. ( LO 102)

  For our final examples of Atlanteana from Smith’s overall corpus of published

  poetry, we turn to the final section of his final and finally published collection of collections, Selected Poems, brought out by Arkham House in late 1971. This final section embodies the cycle of love poems The Hill of Dionysus, which evolved out of the great friendship or deep love that Smith shared with the younger poet Eric

  Barker and his wife, the dancer Madelynne Greene.5 Their friendship began in

  early 1938 and did not end until Smith’s death in August 1961, but waxed at its strongest in the period 1938–55 , the poems themselves apparently coming into being in the years 1939–47.

  Smith’s mother Fanny, or Frances, Gaylord Smith, had passed on in early Sep-

  tember 1935 , and his father in late December 1937. The family had lived together since the poet’s birth, and just as his parents had nurtured him both as person and as poet, so their son had nurtured and nursed the parents, both of them in turn, through their final phase of old age or terminal ill health. Thus the family had always been very close, that is, had lived as almost constant companions for over four full decades, from the early 1890s on into the mid-l930s. By early 1938 Smith found himself not only very much alone but also very lonely. Into this real void the

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  Barkers arrived, and their friendship filled and fulfilled a true need in Smith’s life.

  The three of them would visit back and forth between Auburn and the California

  coast (mostly San Rafael, San Francisco, and the Monterey, Carmel, and Big Sur

  area) during the next twenty years. They would share many pleasant hours of com-panionship, not to mention a number of whimsical adventures. How much this

  love meant to Smith, and in particular the love that he consummated with Made-

  lynne, the poet reveals in “Wizard’s Love,” one of the earliest poems in the cycle The Hill of Dionysus, a favorite hill in San Rafael covered with giant oak trees where they loved to have picnics and similar outings.

  O perfect love, unhoped-for, past despair!

  I had not thought to find

  Your face betwixt the terrene earth and air:

  But deemed you lost in fabulous old lands

  And rose-lit years to darkness long resigned.

  O child, you cannot know

  What magic and what miracles you bring

  Within your tender hands;

  What griefs are lulled to blissful slumbering,

  Cushioned upon your deep and fragrant hair;

  What gall-black bitterness of long ago,

  Within my bosom sealed,

  Ebbs gradually as might some desert well

  Under your beauty’s heaven warm and fair,

  And the green suns of your vertumnal eyes.

  O beauty wrought of rapture and surprise,

  Too dear for heart to know, or tongue to tell! ( SP 366–67)

  The lucid statement of profound emotion in “Wizard’s Love” informs us

  without equivocation just how much value Smith placed on the supreme adventure

  of love, a value also borne out emphatically by the two final paragraphs from “The Enchantress of Sylaire,” one of Smith’s Averoigne chronicles. The two main characters are the poet Anselme and the enchantress herself:

  Again the clinging deliciousness of Sephora was in his arms, and her fruit-soft mouth was crushed beneath his hungry lips.

  The strongest of all enchantments held them in its golden circle. ( AY 140) As we know from her letter to Donald Sidney-Fryer, written in the spring of

  1967 ( EOD 154), the love that bound Ashton, Eric, and Madelynne together, and that Madelynne fully shared, inspired the three of them in so many different ways.

  However, as Madelynne made it clear to Sidney-Fryer in the course of their friendship (from late 1966 until her death at the age of fifty-eight in the early or middle 1970s), Smith had often wanted Eric and herself to move to Auburn so that they

  254 THE FREEDOM OF FANTASTIC THINGS

  could all reside together or close by each other. Nevertheless, Madelynne as dancer and as teacher of dance needed the conveniences and advantages of a big city like San Francisco. She confided that, as much as she loved Ashton, and loved spending long sojourns with him near Auburn or on the coast, she could never have lived

  with him on a regular basis. As Madelynne expressed this, and with real regret, she found Smith such a melancholy man that she found it much too depressing to stay with him indefinitely. She and Eric later introduced Smith to Carol Jones Dorman sometime during latter 1954 . Eric was living at that time as a caretaker on some property in Little Sur (not far from Big Sur), and Smith had come to visit
on an occasion when Carol also happened to be there as a friend to both Eric and Made-

  lynne. Smith and Carol fell in love almost immediately, and were married in mid-November 1954 .

  Too many readers or critics, at least those of male gender, have underestimated or have simply ignored the specific love poems by Smith, beginning with those included in Ebony and Crystal and Sandalwood, continuing through The Jasmine Girdle, and concluding with The Hill of Dionysus (which remains Smith’s last major cycle of poems of any description). Such poems unequivocally make us intimate with the hope and even optimism that Smith reveals in this one area of experience, even in the face of unavoidable doom. Maître de conférence and specialist in highly imaginative literature in the English department at the University of Nantes (the major city in northwest France at the mouth of the river Loire, just southeast of Brittany), Lauric Guillaud has asked in a recent and excellent critical evaluation of Smith’s oeuvre the following question: “Yet is it correct to assume that Smith’s universe is really barren of any hope?” (207). In answering his own question, Guillaud typically neglects or overlooks the evidence to be found in Smith’s overt love poetry.

  The final stanza of “Resurrection” embodies our first specific Atlantean refer-

  ence from The Hill of Dionysus:

  Witch belovèd from of old

  When upon Atlantis rolled

  All the dire and wrathful deep,

  You had kissed mine eyes asleep.

  On my lids shall fall your lips

  In the final sun’s eclipse;

  And your hand shall take my hand

  In the last and utmost land. ( LO 144–45)

  Our next Atlantean reference we find in the opening and closing of “Bond,”

  with its poignant statement of love’s eternal return with the same lovers reincarnating from century to century:

  By the red seal redoubled of that kiss

  When thy lips parted softly to my own

  Ere the sun sank from doomed Poseidonis;

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  [. . .]

  By the sealed ways no prophet has foreshown,

  Whereon our lips shall meet, our footsteps go:—